Tag Archive | "Obamacare"

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released a stunner report saying Obamacare will discourage many from seeking full time work and reduce employment by 2.5 million jobs in ten years. Those unemployed or underemployed receive large Obamacare subsidies. If they become fully employed, those subsidies go away and they might actually lose money, says CBO.

The congressional actuaries go on to state that forgoing Obamacare subsidies and returning to full time work with health benefits (for lower wage and middle class workers) amounts to an average, implicit tax of about 15% paid by each worker. CBO does note that these considerations only affect a segment of the workforce – specifically the middle class and working class who earn annual incomes that put them below 400% of the Federal poverty level (about $95,000 for a family of four). But that represents a large portion of the labor market.

The White House beamed in from Arcturus with comically irrelevant comments in a losing attempt to slap down the report.

The law means people “will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods”, said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

He said the law would also allow participants the freedom to retire early or become stay-at-home parents.

Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) says Obamacare can’t work because millennials aren’t signing up in enough numbers to pay for it. Moran, who announced his retirement after twelve terms, perhaps feels he can now speak his mind. He has a point. The vast bulk of those getting Obamacare get subsidies, which is assumed to be paid for by young people. What happens if they don’t sign up?

“I’m afraid that the millennials, if you will, are less likely to sign up. I think they feel more independent, I think they feel a little more invulnerable than prior generations. But I don’t think we’re going to get enough young people signing up to make this bill work as it was intended to financially. And, frankly, there’s some legitimacy to their concern because the government spends about $7 for the elderly for every $1 it spends on the young,” Moran said.

Obamacare is a confused muddle that seems a gift to insurance companies who, as you may have noticed, supported it. Those who have Obamacare subsidies may receive nasty jolts come tax time in 2015, especially if their income fluctuates, as they could owe additional money. Obamcare rates are based on monthly income. If your income goes up for a few months, then drops back down, your subsidy for those months could be disallowed and thus you’ll have to pay the difference.

Obamacare is curiously overcomplicated. Why is that? And who benefits from it? You might even have to make a repayment even if your income doesn’t fluctuate, suggests one study.

If a person’s income fluctuates, which happens more frequently than many realize, the subsidy amount will change from month to month. Thus, when it comes time to file taxes in April, the amount of subsidy received over the past year must be reconciled with the final calculation of the total subsidy for which the individual was eligible—based on actual income for the entire tax year.

If subsidized Obamacare exchange enrollees don’t report any changes in their income throughout the year, they could be on the hook for potentially expensive repayments come tax time.

People and providers often don’t know if someone is covered. Michael Moore says Obamacare is ‘awful’, a boon to insurance companies, and we have to take the mess that is Obamacare and make it into something workable and useful. And that Obama will be no help.

Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.

I believe Obamacare’s rocky start — clueless planning, a lousy website, insurance companies raising rates, and the president’s telling people they could keep their coverage when, in fact, not all could — is a result of one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go. When right-wing critics “expose” the fact that President Obama endorsed a single-payer system before 2004, they’re actually telling the truth.

What we now call Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor. The president took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and just improved some of its provisions. In effect, the president was simply trying to put lipstick on the dog in the carrier on top of Mitt Romney’s car. And we knew it.

Meanwhile, continuing problems glitches in the system means some have no clue if they are covered or not. People sometimes don’t know if their signup worked, and until they get and pay the first bill, they are not officially covered. Some have been turned away by hospitals and doctors because of unclear insurance status.

Unbelievably, people are being told to start over at the state’s Medicaid office because the software is so borked it apparently told them they were signed up but didn’t actually do it. I’m a software developer and genuinely do not understand how a software system can be that screwed up.

To try to provide coverage to these people before they seek medical care, the Obama administration has launched a barrage of phone calls in recent days in 21 states, advising those who applied that the quickest route into the programs is to start over at their state’s Medicaid agency.

The Health Sherpa makes it easy to look up what Obamacare plans are available to you. Just enter your zip code to see all the plans. You can also display the individual categories of bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. If you are low-income be sure to enter your income to see what subsidy you qualify for. For example, a family of two making $30,000 can get a substantial subsidy of several hundred a month, which can make the policies quite affordable.

The Health Sherpa is not a government site. It was created by three coders in San Francisco who wanted to make it easy for people to research plans. They have performed a huge public service. After you find a plan you like, sign up on healthcare.gov, where it really seems like they’ve gotten the bugs fixed.

Um, shouldn’t the investigation have been ordered in early October, when it was already clear healthcare.gov had massive problems and not just before HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ appearance before a hostile House committee?

I’d like to know why a third tier company, CGI Federal, was given a no-bid contract, after they’d failed building a similar heathcare website for Canada, and why other contractors also got no-bid contracts.

I’m a software developer. 10 percent of Healthcare.gov applications currently sent to insurers have errors, down from 25% in October. This is beyond unacceptable. An invoicing system where 10% of the invoices had errors would be a train wreck. An error rate this high means all applications have to be manually re-checked to insure they are accurate. Sending data to another computer is not complicated or rocket science. It’s difficult to understand how it got so screwed up.

Questions also remain about the accuracy of application files that insurers are receiving from HealthCare.gov and state-run health insurance exchanges. After weeks of media scrutiny, the administration last week said about 10 percent of the application files, known as the “834” files, sent to insurers currently contain erroneous information – down from about 25 percent in October.

The Obama Administration needs to get honest about healthcare.gov instead of making perky comments then immediately backtracking. Crucial back-end functions still aren’t done. Without a functioning back-end, touting front-end improvements is meaningless.

The back-end is dysfunctional at best. The Administration keeps trying to spin this like it’s just a pesky PR image problem. Yet, by their own admission, healthcare.gov still can’t properly process enrollments. Thus, it remains broken. Feeble lies and deliberate evasions by federal officials simply make a bad situation worse.

Federal officials said they had largely succeeded in repairing parts of the site that had most snarled users in the two months since its troubled launch, but acknowledged they only had begun to make headway on the biggest underlying problems: the system’s ability to verify users’ identities and accurately transmit enrollment data to insurers.

Mock James O’Keefe at your peril. His videos just forced a sleazy Enroll America director in Texas to resign. Me, I appluad what he’s doing. Tarango appears to be just another compromised politico.

Chris Tarango, Texas Communications Director for Enroll America, a Sebelius-linked group dedicated to signing people up for Obamacare, resigned following a Project Veritas investigation. The video exposé showed Tarango conspiring to release private data to help a political action committee.

Obama said healthcare.gov would have 80% functionality by today, yet 30-40% of crucial back-end work remains to be done. We need a full investigation as to why a third-tier consulting company in Canada got this no-bid contract, especially since they’d already botched a similar health care website in Canada.

Technicians are still working on the back-end functions of the site, or the portion that makes sure insurers get their checks when people who will receive subsidies enroll. As of last week, 30% to 40% of that work remained to be done.

This is pathetic. Despite perky assessments from Team Obama, if the back-end is nowhere near completion then neither is the website.

A bill collector told me a person’s social security number is the magic key that unlocks all the doors. Cracking healthcare.gov will give hackers access to millions of social security numbers, and lots more juicy accompanying data too. Our dimbulb Congress is clueless about this.

Security professionals [testifying to Congress] made a reasonable argument that the healthcare site was in fact fundamentally flawed where security was concerned and that it seemed that the government had in fact not considered the security import of the nature of the data they were to traffic in. SQL flaws are abundant on the site and the interconnections to backend databases including places like the IRS will make it the single point of failure for what I am sure will be the worlds largest compromise of PII [Personally Identifiable Information] data on the planet short of the machinations of the NSA.